


Ars Gratis Artis

by nirejseki



Series: Meme Fills [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Mentions of Prison, mentions of canonical child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 11:25:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10535508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: Len probably should have thought twice before he revealed to everybody just how good an artist Mick is.(years later, Mick pays him back for it)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Legends of Super Flarrow Kink Meme prompt 30: Coldwave. Artist!Mick gets Leonard to pose for him. Naked. 
> 
> This prompt did not go the way I wanted to, so there's no smut and barely any naked posing. Sorry!

“This shit’s gorgeous,” Len says frankly, and he means it, too.

“Lenny,” Mick whines. His face is red and he keeps shifting awkwardly from side to side, as he had been ever since he’d come home and found Len perusing his artwork. “Just leave it be, will you?”

“No, seriously!” Len says. “I don’t know why you kept these from me. They’re amazing. Did you make these with a _blowtorch_?”

“The initial groundwork, yeah,” Mick says. “The rest is pencil and pen and stuff. Lenny…”

“Do you sell them?”

“No!”

“You should.”

“No one would buy them,” Mick argues.

Len snorts. “Sure they would,” he says firmly. “Your art’s really good.”

Mick is wringing his hands, but he’s stopped trying to pull Len away. “You really think so?”

“I really think so.”

“You’re just buttering me up,” Mick says suspiciously.

“I’d steal it,” Len says firmly.

“You’d steal anything.”

“I’m serious! This is sell on the black market good.” Len pauses. “This may even be sell on the _normal_ market good.”

Mick snorts. “Don’t be stupid,” he says.

Of course, Mick being dismissive just makes Len more intent on proving him wrong, which is why he looks up one of the better agents in the city – no mob ties, nothing! – and marches over there and breaks into her office and shows her a few carefully purloined pieces.

“I’m going to call the police” turns into “wow, this is _amazing_!” almost gratifyingly fast.

Len gives her Mick’s number and goes home smug and satisfied.

Somehow Len didn’t realize that this would cause Mick to be swept away into a sea of agents and media hounds and all sorts of people that meant that Len with his open warrants because of his work with his father needed to stay far, far away, for both of their sakes.

He regrets it, later, but it’s far too late by then.

Mick's gone.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Who’re you?” Len asks.

The big guy jumps nearly a foot in the air, turning on a dime. He’s not someone Len recognizes; he doesn’t have prison tats or anything that Len would recognize. There’s an offhand chance that he might be someone Len knew from before, but it’s doubtful; Len’s not really expecting a welcoming committee.

Not after six years on the inside. 

He’d learned plenty of lessons in there, and the foremost one is that expecting anything gets you nothing but disappointment.

Right now, out less than a week, he’d visited Lisa – happily in college on the money he sent himself up the river to earn, and uninterested in seeing him, which hurt even as he understood – and he’d come back to an empty apartment with nothing waiting for him.

Well, he’d thought he had, before he’d found this man hovering around. 

He laces his hands behind his back and arches a pleasant eyebrow while fingering the knife he’d lifted earlier. He wishes now that he’d gone to get a gun instead of visiting Lisa; if this was some mistake from before, here to haunt him…

“I – uh –” the man stutters, his eyes wide.

“You’re in my apartment,” Len says. 

“Your apartment? You – are you _Lenny_?”

Len stiffens. “I don’t go by that name –” _Nobody_ calls him that, nobody _ever_ calls him that, no one except Lisa - Lisa and -

His brain catches up with his eyes.

“ _Mick?_ ”

“You’ve changed,” Mick says weakly. "Grown up."

“You have, too,” Len says, blinking and stepping forward to examine Mick closer. “Look at you! You’ve gotten…”

He bites his tongue before he can finish with ‘hot’, since technically that was true already, not that he’d ever admitted it. Though Mick’s only gotten more attractive, with his big strong shoulders and well-muscled arms and a superbly fitting casual business sort of get-up, though for all its casualness Len can tell it’s worth more than any outfit he’s ever worn.

“…well-dressed,” he concludes lamely. “What’re you doing here? How’s the art thing?”

“Going well,” Mick says, rubbing the back of his neck. “I – I heard you’d gotten out.”

“Yeah,” Len says. He hesitates. “Is this about me telling you not to come visit me?”

“I wanted to know what I did,” Mick says, very quietly. 

“It wasn’t you!” Len protests. “I said so in my letter!”

“But –”

“It wasn’t for _me_ ,” Len says, exasperated. Though he supposes there's no use hiding it anymore, now that it's in the past. “It was for _you_.”

“What?!”

“You had a career! A _non-criminal_ career! If your media hounds had found out you were visiting a criminal in prison every week –”

“Who the hell told you that?! That’s not even true!”

Len shrugs, looking down and away. “Your publicist –”

“Goddamn that man,” Mick snarls. “I’m glad I fired him; I only wish I’d realized sooner. Lenny, I swear, it won’t be a problem. Though, well, I guess it’s not important any more, since you’re out now.”

“Out and soon enough back in,” Len says dryly. He nods at the empty apartment. “Not like I have much employment prospects, other than running a few heists.”

He doesn’t tell Mick how he dreamt of him in prison, how he longed even before then to have someone at his back, someone dependable, a _partner_ , a real one, a partner in crime, a partner in everything. Mick – well, the Mick Len used to know – he would have tried to drop everything. He was loyal like that. Which was why he would’ve been the perfect partner, and also why Len couldn’t let him do anything like that. 

“You don’t have money?” Mick says with a frown.

“By the end of next week, I won’t even have a place to live,” Len replies with a shrug. “This place took the voucher I got from the prison for the halfway house, but they’re a scam; they should’ve given me two months, not two weeks. And it’ll be a cold day in hell when I go back to my dad for help...”

He hasn’t quite figured out what he’ll do about it, but he’s sure he’ll think of something. A week is far too short to plan a decent heist, and he’s not interested in going back to prison so quickly. 

“Come with me,” Mick says.

“What?”

“I have an apartment. You can come stay with me.”

“Are you _sure_?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Mick says, smiling now that he has something he can do. He was always happiest when he was acting, not thinking; he was perfectly capable of contemplation, he just disliked it. “You’re my best friend, Lenny.”

“It’s been six years,” Len protests. “I’m sure you have new friends…”

“None like you,” Mick says firmly. “C’mon, where’s your stuff?”

Len gestures helpless towards his still-unpacked duffle bag. “Mick, your job –”

“I’m an artist,” Mick says. “We’re eccentric by nature. No one will even notice, I promise.”

“But –”

“It’s not like artists get the same fame treatment as movie stars, okay?”

Len concedes the point and gets his bag.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting when they get to Mick’s home, but an apartment in the up-and-coming side of town isn’t it. It’s not the old-money area, no, but it’s not all that far away from it; filled with young people trying to make a mark, still cheap enough for those who could afford something, but well out of price for those like Len who could afford nothing. 

“It’s close to the gallery,” Mick explains when he sees Len squint at a street sign in disbelief. 

Mick also failed to mention that he lives in the _penthouse_ apartment.

“Jesus,” Len says, falling back on old speech patterns picked up in prison. He was always a terrible Jew. “How many people live in this place?”

“Just me.”

“This is the whole side of the building, Mick!”

“Yeah, well,” Mick says.

“Art thing’s been going very well, huh?” Len says, for lack of a better thing to say.

“It pays,” Mick says ruefully. “And pays and pays and pays, some days. Not so much recently. I haven’t been producing much.”

“Why not?”

Mick shrugs. “No inspiration.”

Len arches his eyebrows. 

“It’s an artist thing, I swear,” Mick says. “Can I get you food?”

Len has never been dumb enough to say no to one of Mick’s meals. There’s only leftovers, but it’s so much better than anything he’s had in years – prison isn’t really for the faint of stomach – that he just falls all over it. Crusty bread, tomato and cucumber salad to dip it in, slices of steak –moist and tender and perfect like he’s never had before –

Len probably sounds like he’s having either an orgasm or a religious experience or both, but he can’t bring himself to care.

Mick is strangely quiet while Len eats, mostly just staring, but Len figures he’s just readjusting to Len’s terrible table manners. He squashes the jealous thought wondering who Mick’s been eating these dinners with, the last six years, reminding himself he has no place to judge. 

They're probably really pretty and nice and non-criminal and treat Mick like a normal person and don't eat with their hands. 

Damnit.

“So what’s your current project?” Len asks, licking his fingers and trying to distract himself from his thoughts. 

“I, uh,” Mick says. “I…sorry, gotta run.”

And then he dashes out of the room.

Len blinks. 

“What should I do?” he calls.

No answer.

He frowns. That wasn't really classic Mick behavior. 

Maybe he should go after him? Or maybe not. He’s unbalanced; it’s been so long, and they’re different. He doesn’t know what Mick would like.

Besides, there’s enough for seconds, and Len is _famished_. 

He’ll wait for Mick to come back.

It takes about an hour, but Mick does come back, looking vaguely dazed, his fingers smudged and black.

Len nods at them. “Fire?” he asks.

“Huh?” Mick looks down. “Oh. No. Charcoal. I still do the fire-based works, for the art, I mean, but I base out a lot of my ideas first. Sketches, stuff like that. I’ve been experimenting with paints, too.”

“Cool,” Len says, for lack of anything better to say. He'd actually meant lighting things on fire.

“I’m seeing a therapist for the fire thing,” Mick adds, so clearly his thoughts were going the same way.

“That's good,” Len says approvingly. “At least, I hope so? Not one that calls you crazy and puts you on a ton of meds, right?”

“No, no. Sung-hui is great. We do a lot of cognitive therapy and stuff. Controlled burns, limited time periods, and other methods of managing my anxiety other than fire…I can tell you more about it tomorrow, if you like,” he says, observing Len trying to hide a yawn. “You’re tired.”

“I’m okay.”

“I’ve got to stay up to do some work anyway,” Mick says reasonably. “Why don’t you crash? I got a guest bed.”

Well, Len’s not going to say no. He’s already agreed to stay here, after all.

Also, as he discovers moments later, Mick’s guest bed is made of dreams and happiness.

“Egyptian cotton, actually,” Mick says with a laugh.

“I’m never leaving,” Len declares.

“I was kinda hoping you wouldn’t,” Mick says. He’s not talking about the bed. 

Len shakes his head a little. Mick doesn’t realize how much has changed. Hell, Len hadn’t even been his full height when he’d gone into prison – nineteen and skinny, the last bits of growing unfolding later than usual because of early malnutrition – and now he was twenty-five, a felon who’d served time, who’d bashed heads together and shivved people for his own protection. Someone who was good for nothing but more crime, just like his dad had always said.

Mick’s done so well for himself. It won’t take him long to realize that there’s nothing Len can offer him.

Until that day, though, Len is keeping the bed. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mick has the weirdest schedule Len’s ever seen. He gets captivated by the strangest things – it used to be fire, now it’s all sorts of weird things, like Len eating cereal in front of the television or Len lounging on the couch reading a magazine with his feet on the back or Len tossing a ball around or Len eating an apple (not even anything respectably distracting like a popsicle!), and then he runs out of the room to the other half of the top floor.

Which is apparently Mick’s _studio_. 

Lots of big warehouse-y space, with Mick’s fire gear, fancy blowtorch and a fire pit and all, and a positive mountain of paints, pastels and all other sorts of things. He apparently makes his own charcoal, which Len doesn’t even want to know the details of. 

He also works on any number of canvases and tough, thick paper. 

And even Len’s got to admit, Mick’s art is _glorious_. There’s a few unfinished pieces that Mick’s abandoned – stuff Mick says he’s disappointed in – but Len can see the delicacy and the skill, the way each feather of a bird is sketched out and then elongated for a better image, the way a landscape shifts from ultra-realistic to a vivid surrealist nightmare. 

Mick just point-blank asked him not to look at any of the covered art, the in-progress pieces, and so Len hasn’t been, despite his raging curiosity.

He’s looked Mick up in the local art galleries, too. The finished product is, if anything, even more amazing. There’s one that’s labelled a seascape but Len can tell that the sea is based on a raging fire; he spends nearly two hours just staring at it instead of looking for jobs, which is what he’s supposed to be doing.

Well, it’s what he’s assigned himself to doing, anyway. Mick insists he doesn’t need to pay rent or do anything like that, like Len just sleeping on his couch and eating his food is good enough for him, but that’s just ridiculous. Len’s literally contributing nothing to this partnership – he doesn’t even do the chores, because Mick has a housekeeper who comes in once a week to do the laundry and clean house. 

Rose-Merline’s nice enough, even if she does look at Len like he’s an evil felon who’s taking advantage of Mick’s generosity.

Well, she’s nice enough after Len confronts her, admits it straight up, and asks her with some great puzzlement how he’s supposed to _stop_ doing that. 

She suggests he look for jobs. He points out that there is zero chance Mick will let him pay the rent.

She suggests doing chores. He points out that that would put her out of a job, and Mick would never allow that.

After a few moments of careful thought, she asks, “Have you considered sex?”

“Only my entirely life, have you _looked_ at him?!” Len replies.

She sniggers. 

After that, they’re friends. She’s from Haiti, apparently; Mick is sponsoring her through employment for her visa until she can get a green card so that her abusive ex-husband can’t hold the power to report her for deportation over her head. 

Len vaguely remembers being incredibly drunk at age 17 and telling Mick about how of all the things he couldn’t forgive his father for, telling his mother that if she didn’t stay, he’d tell his friends at the police and she’d be sent back home and never see Len ever again was one of the most deeply etched. And she’d actually been legal, too; that was the worst of it – she’d believed him because he was a police officer, when he told her he could somehow get her citizenship grant revoked. So she’d stayed. So she’d died.

Mick’d been drunk too, but he’d listened.

Len has to go find a place to sit down for a while. 

It doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s _doing_ here.

“Can I steal you something?” he asks Mick.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Mick replies, a little wryly. “Receipt of stolen goods is a crime too, you know.”

“Ugh,” Len says, and puts his forehead down on the table.

Clearly, the time for good ideas is past. It's time for a good old-fashioned sulk. 

Mick makes that choking noise that signals ‘inspiration’ and usually precedes him dashing out of the room.

Len off-handedly waves a hand. “You can go,” he tells the table, albeit in his best mournful tone. “We’ll discuss later. I’m just gonna sit here and stew in my existential angst for a bit. No problem.”

Mick is silent for a moment. “Do you – would you mind if I stayed?” he asks hesitantly. “No, no, don’t get up!” he adds when Len makes a move to do so. “I – the way you’re sitting is just – can I just sketch you real quick?”

“Sure,” Len replies, slightly puzzled.

There’s the tearing of paper and then the sound of quick pencil-marks. 

Len considers commenting, but shrugs and goes back to contemplating the absurdities of life.

Art. 

Of all things, _art_. 

Insofar as he’d ever considered it, he’d always figure he’d hook up with a forger or something. Not a real honest-to-god sells-enough-to-make-a-good-living artist. 

“What’re you thinking about?” Mick ask.

“How fate’s a dick,” Len says. “Also: woe is me. The usual, y'know.”

“You’re amazing,” Mick says. He sounds like he means it, too, which is frankly bizarre. 

“I’m not _doing_ anything,” Len says, lifting his head at last and squinting at Mick, who’s smiling down at the pad of paper in his hands. “Hey, is that me? Lemme see.”

“It’s not really…it’s a bit abstract – well, sort of –”

Len holds out his hand.

Mick obediently hands it over. 

There’s a sketch of Len slouched over the table in the bottom left hand corner, perfectly rendered in a few simple strokes, radiating sulkiness, but the larger picture takes up the top half of the paper – the same image, sort of, but simplified even further, filled with darks and lights, until Len looks like some strange being brooding upon his wrongs. Some sculpture of the thinker, or some gargoyle, or…

“I’m the magician’s apprentice,” Len says blankly.

“You’re what?”

“Mickey Mouse. From Fantasia, you know? Powerful, but immature. Spending a lot of time going uuuuuuugh.” He considers. “Without the ears.”

“Yes,” Mick says, staring at him. “Yes, that’s – that’s it exactly. I need to –”

“Go?”

“Some things need oils,” Mick says nonsensically and dashes away, snatching the picture out of Len’s hands.

“You’re gonna have to show me what you’re working on one day!” Len calls after him.

Two days later, Len gets his wish. 

Mick calls him into the studio and pulls off the canvas.

“Holy crap,” Len says, staring.

It’s him, but it’s – not him, either. The colors swirl together, like the man’s actual emanating the sheer feeling of sulk, the rich jewel tones of his tapestry-like cloak melting into the dark cloud that sweeps around his head – like if Turner or someone had made his storm scenes into a person. But at the same time, there’s the distinctive edge of _melodrama_ – the man in the painting has power, elegant lines and a brooding sense of strength, but he’s softened around the edges. He's not scary. The problem isn’t nearly as bad as he’s making it out to be, and somewhere deep inside he knows it, and you can see it in him - the little curl of his lip, the pout, the wrinkle in between his eyes.

“You like it?” Mick asks, an eerie echo of when they were far younger. “You really like it?”

“It’s _amazing_ ,” Len says. “That’s based on _me_?”

Mick scrubs his face. “Everything I’ve done lately is based on you,” he confesses. “You just – you’re like an opal.”

“What?”

“Like, you know. One of those rocks that every way you turn it, it’s a different color, a different play of light, it’s just…you can’t get tired of looking, but every angle’s different, every one’s pretty. You know.”

Len most certainly doesn’t know, but he’s touched regardless. 

“Happy to be of service,” he says with a shrug and a punch to Mick’s shoulder. “Now c’mon, you were in the middle of preparing me dinner _two days ago_.”

“…uh.”

“I ordered take-out on your card,” Len tells him virtuously. “And left you yours outside your workshop.”

“I’d been wondering where that’d come from…”

Len has a week to try to grapple with what it means, if anything, that Mick likes to draw him now, reaching absolutely no conclusions, when Mick comes back from the studio one day with a vaguely shell-shocked look on his face.

“Hey, what’s up?” Len asks, pulling away from the table where he’d been doing the daily crossword. 

“My agent stopped by earlier for one of her ‘you’d better be producing art, mister’ lectures,” Mick says. “Because I kinda haven’t been.”

“But you go make art all the time,” Len protests.

“Well, yeah, _now_ I do. Anyway, I showed her some of the ones I’d done recently and she liked ‘em.”

“Of course she did,” Len says. “Your stuff is amazing.” Even with only having seen one piece, he knows it to be true, and he’d say it even if it wasn’t true. Luckily with Mick, he doesn’t have to lie.

“She took a polaroid and took it to one of her clients,” Mick says, “and she just came by to tell me that he bought it on the spot, sight of the real thing unseen. And to drop off the check.”

“That’s good,” Len says encouragingly. “That’s…how this art business works, right? You do a thing, she sells it?”

“Usually there’s a gallery stage first, but yeah. It’s – it’s the one of you. The Magician’s Apprentice.”

“So I’ll be hanging in some rich guy’s living room,” Len says, amused beyond all belief. “Awesome.”

“I think my agent said he wanted it for his teenage son’s room, actually,” Mick says, his lips twitching. 

Len snickers. “Of course he did. I approve. What’s with the weird face, though?”

“I’ve never sold to that client before,” Mick says.

“So?”

“It’s just – here, just look.” Mick hands him the check.

Len takes it, amused, and looks it over.

Then he frowns. “They misplaced a zero. Couple of zeros, actually.”

“No,” Mick says. “They didn’t.”

“…your art does _not_ sell for that much. I checked the galleries.”

“Nope. Normally I have to sell at least five, eight paintings to get to that number.” He pauses. “Guess it does now, though.”

“Holy _crap_ , Mick. We should go celebrate!”

At last Mick smiles, big and broad. “You don’t mind?”

“I’m finally contributing something to the household; you kidding? I’m delighted. You paint me as much as you like.”

Mick beams at him.

He also takes that as permission to more or less just follow Len around with a sketchbook, which Len minds not at all. Len even gets to meet Mick’s agent – same one he broke into her house, all those years back – and she doesn’t recognize him, but she _does_ kiss him on the cheek and tell him that she full expects him to pay for her kid’s college.

Mick assures Len that she means via her commissions on Mick’s paintings, not in person. 

Len quietly comes down from the heart attack he’d been having.

Len’s enjoying his life so much, he doesn’t even expect it when the hand shoots out and stops him on the street. 

He’s still got enough of his old instincts left to turn abruptly and yank his arm away, but he’s unarmed – foolish – and…

It’s Lewis.

“Heard you got out, son,” Lewis says. “And doing pretty well, by the looks of it.”

Mick had bought Len a whole new wardrobe, blacks and blues like Len likes best, fabric that actually felt good against his skin. Len hadn’t seen any price tags and he’d liked it just fine that way; he had a nose for expensive things, and he knew for a fact he was wearing some.

“What do you want?” Len says stiffly.

Lewis arches his eyebrows. “Can’t a man come talk to his son?”

“No,” Len says. “What do you _want_? Lisa’s in college now. You can’t touch her.”

“I can do whatever I damn well please,” Lewis says, his eyes glinting in a way that has Len flinching back despite himself. “But right now, I’ll settle for a cut of whatever scam you’re pulling.”

“There’s no scam.”

Lewis snorts. “You telling me you got yourself a closet full of Armani and you ain’t running a scam? What’d you do, empty out Central City National all by yourself? No one in town’s admitted to working with you.”

“Maybe I’m going straight.”

Lewis lays a hand on Len’s shoulder. “People like us don’t go straight, son,” he says. “We just do cons that last longer.”

His hand squeezes tight. “Me and my bosses have a little misunderstanding I need to clear up. You get me five thousand by Friday.”

“I don’t _have_ –”

“You’re a bright boy,” Lewis says. “You’ll think of something.”

“I don’t have to,” Len says fiercely. “You have nothing on me.”

Lewis arches his eyebrows. “I still got buddies with the force,” he says. “There’s a lot that can go wrong at – art galleries, was it? You’ve been visiting them an awful lot, from what I hear.”

Len goes home.

Mick comes back in from the studio a few hours later and immediately figures out that something’s wrong.

“Tell me,” he says.

Len shrugs listlessly. He doesn’t want to burden Mick with this; Mick will give him the money, he knows, but that’ll just be the beginning. Once Lewis knows that Len is a valid source, he’ll just keep asking and asking.

But if Len doesn’t turn up with the cash, Lewis will insist that he help him out with a job. And if it’s a job that Lewis plans, then it’s going to go wrong and people are going to die, and this time Len’s going to go into prison and be looking at numbers like ‘twenty’ and ‘life’. 

Better to run his own heist and get it out of the way.

He doesn’t want to, though.

He’s gotten _lazy_. He likes it, living here with Mick, letting Mick take care of him. Being a professional muse, so to speak.

“Lenny, please. Tell me.”

So he does.

“That’s extortion.”

“He’s not actually threatening me with anything,” Len says. “I just know he is.”

Mick frowns. “It’s not extortion when it’s you,” he says slowly. “But it would be if it were me.”

Len frowns at him. “What’re you thinking?” 

“It’s a bad idea.”

It _is_ a bad idea. But after a bit of brainstorming by Len, it turns into a not-half-bad idea.

They can’t trust the local police, but Mick’s agent apparently has dealt with a world of art theft and the assorted surrounding crimes before, and she has very good personal friends in a number of agencies.

Len goes to his dad and tells him he can’t get him the money by Friday.

This is the one part of the thing Mick didn’t like, and Len knows why, because his dad _starts_ the debate by punching Len straight in the eye and knocking him back onto his ass.

“It doesn’t mean I can’t get it!” Len yelps, holding out his hands. “It’s just – it’ll take some time.”

“Oh yeah?” Lewis says, stepping forward, clearly not believing a word. “How’s that?”

“I told you, it’s not a scam,” Len says. “It’s – there’s an artist.”

“An artist?”

“I hooked up with an artist,” Len says. “One of the ones that they sell in the art galleries.”

Lewis guffaws, losing his angry stance. “You got yourself a wealthy woman on the hook,” he says, amused. “Or is it a sugar daddy? My son, whoring himself out for a nice coat.”

Len flinches, because it is that way, a little, but honestly not as much that way as he’d like it to be. 

He’d be okay with it if it were Mick. 

Hell, if Mick were interested in him, Len would jump him for _free_.

“So what is it? You don’t have him on the hook enough to ask for money?”

“I’ve only been with him a few months,” Len says. “It’d be suspicious if I asked for it all at once. But there is one thing…”

“What?”

“He’s moving a shipment of his art on Friday,” Len says. “There’s this one painting that he sold for a lot more than five grand.”

“I’m listening,” Lewis says.

He does listen. He listens nice and good to the poison Len drips into his ear, and when he and his crew try to grab the shipment on Friday, they meet armored-up FBI instead. Some of the crew sing like sparrows about who _really_ backed the job, but Lewis doesn’t – he knows better than to squeal for fear of getting shivved in prison – and he goes down for at least ten years, though he'll probably weasel his way out sooner. 

But that's tomorrow's problem.

Len breathes a sigh of relief.

The FBI shakes his hand and congratulates him, and offers to give him a little recommendation letter for his file if he ever needs it to get a job.

“I can’t believe that worked, honestly,” Len tells the FBI guy.

“Lenny, your plans always work,” Mick says dismissively. 

“Not always. I’m just good at figuring out puzzles, is all.”

“If you like puzzles,” the FBI guy says, “I bet I have one you can’t solve. Closed-room art gallery robbery took place a few years back. It’s practically the department bugaboo.”

“Huh,” Len says. “Lemme see.”

After he finishes explaining to the FBI guy how it was done – false doors, _obviously_ evident in the photos of the crime scene by the differentiation of the wood grain – the FBI guy says, “So, about that recommendation letter –”

“Yeah, that’ll be useful if I ever find a place that’ll hire me,” Len says with a small laugh. “Not many of those.”

“Actually,” the guy says. “We could use a consultant, if you don’t mind working part-time until all the paperwork goes through. More puzzle-solving.”

And now Len has a job that goes outside of professional muse.

They go out to dinner to a fancy place to celebrate.

“I feel like I ought to be posing for you naked or something,” Len tells Mick when they get home, still fizzy on freedom and success and champagne. “Since I’m your muse.”

“That wouldn’t be what I’d do if I got you naked,” Mick says, because he’d had a lot more to drink than Len, and he looks horrified for the five seconds that it takes Len to figure out what he said, grab him, and lay one on him.

“You know you don’t have to, right?” Mick says.

“Are you kidding? I’ve wanted to do this since I was _fourteen_ ,” Len replies, and that’s the end of that.

A day or so later, Mick twists over in bed and looks at Len, who’s just enjoying lying in the sunbeam on the warm sheets, and he makes that little choked sound.

“Yes,” Len says lazily. “You can draw me.”

“Oh thank _god_ ,” Mick says, and rushes out to get supplies.

He doesn’t bother to stop for clothing, which Len appreciates. 

(The series Mick produces from the next few weeks is titled ‘The Cat and the Canary’, is extremely abstract and yet deeply satisfying in many ways, and sells for a frankly ridiculous amount of money.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Ars Gratis Artis [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14579010) by [litrapod (litra)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/litra/pseuds/litrapod)




End file.
